Chuck Bender's new gig

Megan Fitzpatrick:

I am beyond delighted to announce that Charles “Chuck” Bender is Popular Woodworking Magazine’s new senior editor…Chuck joins PWM June 3, and will be working from his Pennsylvania-based shop through the summer as he wraps up classes at his school, Acanthus Workshop, before moving to Cincinnati with his wife, Lorraine, this fall. 

Congratulations to Chuck on his new position, and to Popular Woodworking Magazine for the new hire. I’m going to miss having him so close to New Jersey.

I’m also sure one of the things that attracted Chuck to his new gig is that the greater Cincinnati area has two locations of his favorite restaurant.

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I read Christopher Schwarz’s write up of his new “A Traditional Tool Chest in Two Days” DVD, aka “The Traitor’s Tool Chest”.

When I go to Woodworking in America, I’m going to go to his talk on building tool chests and workbenches out of home center materials, and I’m going to yell, “Judas!” And he can retort, “I don’t beLIEVE you. You’re a LIAR.”

Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 18

(Originally written March 22, 2010)

The legs are connected to the top!

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After several cycles of adjusting the tenons and/or mortises, test fitting the legs to the top, working the legs out of the top (the hardest part), and adjusting again, I had gotten the legs so that they were fitting to a point that when the leg tenons were inserted into the mortises, the shoulders of the leg tenons were about 3/8” from meeting up with the benchtop. But it seemed that I just needed to to the slightest bit of trimming to get it to fit. But I decided to go with brute force instead.

See the clamps in the pictures? Those are 36” Wetzlers. I placed the clamps across the bottom of the legs and the benchtop, and I used them to force the legs home. The net result is that at least some of those 8 M/T joints are an extremely tight friction fit — so tight that I decided to let gravity and friction to keep these joints in place. This assembly is not coming apart any time soon. If by chance it does, I’ll drawbore and glue the joint.

Whew!

Next step: making the groove in the bottom of the benchtop for the deadman, and then I can turn this bench over. After begging my neighbors for help, that is.

Handworks is coming

If you still don’t have plans for Memorial Day weekend, consider going to Handworks. It will be an incredible meeting of some of the best toolmakers around. In addition, Don Williams and Christopher Schwarz will be giving a presentation on the Studley tool chest. I’m really regretting not being able to go, even though, to my knowledge, there won’t be a single Japanese tool in sight.

There have been a number of write-ups about this, but I’ll direct you to Raney Nelson’s, since it’s the most entertaining one I’ve seen, with the added benefit of a Sleater-Kinney reference.

Make your bed

Greg Knopp had contacted me earlier about fixing up a Japanese plane that he had. From the photos he sent me, it looked like it was in nice shape, except for one thing: the blade protruded a good ways past the mouth.

As it turns out, I have a Japanese plane that does the same thing.

This sometimes happens with Japanese planes. What I think happens is that the body shrinks over time, which effectively lowers the bed as the wood moves away from the position that it originally was in when the blade was fitted to the plane. As the bed lowers, it allows the blade to sink further into the grooves that hold it in place, resulting in the excessive protrusion you see above.

There are three ways to deal with this situation.

1. Make a new body for your plane blade. My guess is that’s more work than you want to do. It certainly is more work than I would want to do to fix this issue.

2. Grind down the blade so that it no longer protrudes out of the mouth like that. That would be a bit waste of a good portion of your blade, and you would have to do a lot of grinding, resharpening, and tapping out the blade. That’s also a lot of work.

3. Raise the bed by gluing a thin shim in place. A thin piece of cardboard has often been used for this. Some people swear by copier paper, business card stock, or index cards. Others would resaw a thin piece of wood. Once you do that, the blade shouldn’t be able to go all the way down. Then start rescraping the bed to allow the blade to drop down again.

I decided to go the thin piece of wood route. I’ve tried paper and cardboard before for this task, and found that when it came to rescraping the bed, the scraping was much less predictable than I liked. I’d often try to remove a small bit of the paper or cardboard, and come away with a bigger chunk than I wanted.

The first step is to get a thin piece of wood. I had a scrap of hard maple available, and resawed it to get a thin piece that was a strong 1/32” thick.

As it turned out, the shim was not quite even all the way across, but that’s not critical. I’m going to be shaving away at it anyway to fit the blade when this process is all done.

Next, I needed to cut it to fit the bed of the plane. The first time I tried this, I did a lot of trimming, then fitting, then trimming again. Eventually I realized that I already had a template for the shape of the bed.

I used the plane blade to trace an outline on the shim, and cut it out slightly oversized. Then I trimmed the edges with a plane until it fit nicely in the bed.

I used a liberal amount of hide glue, and set the shim in place. To apply pressure, I used the plane blade, and tapped it in with a hammer.

The plane blade now sits a good 1/4” short of the mouth, even with vigorous tapping with a hammer. In the above picture, the shim can be seen past the end of the blade.

I checked the shim around the mouth of the plane from the underside just to make sure that the shim was seated on the bed. Once the glue dried, I could pop the blade out, and start rescraping the shim to fit the blade to the plane just as I would if I was setting up the plane for the first time.